Category Archives: SharePoint 2013

I was working with my new SharePoint 2013 farm and found an interesting situation that may cause you to consider your approach to a SharePoint 2013 environment. Since we are producing software for multiple SharePoint configurations and instances, I do a tremendous amount of heterogeneous farm configuration testing. One of our engineers pointed out this little anomaly with SharePoint 2013 and I proceeded to do some further testing. Here is the situation: If you have a green field SharePoint 2013, you can create site collections in either SharePoint 2013 (default) or in a compatibility mode SharePoint 2010 experience. The screenshot below shows the option in the Site Collection creation page:

Now, the end result is that you get a 2010 looking site in the SharePoint 2013 farm. However, this goes beyond the “experience”. The architecture is such that this new site will leverage configuration information in the 14 hive rather than the 15 hive. With respect to the Content Type Hub configuration, what I found was that a site created in SharePoint 2013 experience will publish content types to those sites running in 2013 experience. It will not publish content types to a site created with 2010 experience. Further testing also shows that you can define a 2010 experience site as the Content Type Hub for your 2013 environment, but it will not publish content types to a 2013 experience site. This has tremendous implications for running a governed SharePoint environment as well as how you approach your site upgrades for existing will-governed SharePoint 2010 environments. I believe that Microsoft has really taken the process of upgrading enterprise environments seriously and has made huge strides in this area; however, little potholes in the road are always good to know about before moving ahead at full speed.